Norton Junior School

Sharing our Stories: 26/01/2024

26th January 2024Geoff Hewitt

Beautiful Work This Week

XP Festival of Learning 2024

The Staff Day in January saw the launch of our proposed teaching and learning model as part of our Festival of Learning. The event took place at XP Doncaster and was attended by staff from across all schools in the Trust. All staff had the opportunity to explore the model in more depth as well as attending other workshops on different parts of the model.

This is part of the Trust’s commitment to ensure that we expose more students to more impactful teaching more of the time.

Beautiful Curation: A Christmas Carol

There is now an awesome display at XP to celebrate the Christmas Carol Study Guide – the beautiful work of last year’s Year 11s. Be sure to go and admire their hard work on display!

Top of the Blogs

Thoughtful Thursday @ Norton Infants

Year 5 Photography Club @ Green Top

X28 Crew Lovelace Beautiful Work @ XP

Bobby’s awesome home learning @ Plover

C27 Community Meeting @ XP East

Exploring Carnivores, Herbivores and Omnivores @ Carcroft School

Our Learning Journey – Hook Week @ Norton Juniors

Share your stories with us!

We now have a new dedicated news email so that you can send your stories, updates or ideas about potential news articles directly to us in Comms.

It might be something you or your students have achieved, a charity you’re supporting or anything at all that deserves a wider audience.

Write to us at [email protected] – we want to hear about it, write about it and celebrate it!

Our Learning Journey- Hook Week

26th January 2024Joshua Carr

Year 5 have been busy working through their new expedition ‘The Power of Change’. They have started exploring the guiding question ‘How has the 18th Century influenced lives today?’.

We began our expedition with our usual ‘Hook Week’, the above photo shows our learning journey so far. We experienced what a Victorian School and Victorian Workhouse would have been like, built background knowledge about Victorian Schools, visited Danum Museum and the surrounding areas, explored a Victorian artist (William Morris), watched Oliver Twist and began to look at The Industrial Revolution in more detail.

We are already working through our first case study and can’t wait to find out even more!

Immersion week field work

25th January 2024Helen Jenkins

Last week, 5HJ completed fieldwork in Doncaster City Centre exploring how the Industrial Revolution has influenced Doncaster today. After a tour of the city centre looking at buildings of that time, we visited Danum Museum where we discovered how Doncaster was pivotal in the construction of trains. The children were also immersed in a workhouse experience which involved tedious tasks such as picking up grains of rice. 😫

Y4 Welcome some Expert Visitors

25th January 2024Gavin Chadwick

A great big thank you to the staff from DMBC Waste and Recycling Education Team who visited Y4 on Wednesday and held a workshop around the importance of recycling waste products and the journey it takes when leaving our bins. The session was highly engaging and interactive, incredibly informative and both the children and staff learnt a thing or two about how we should be recycling our household waste!

The ‘Plant’ 🏭🚂

24th January 2024Charlie Cicero

This week, 6CC have enjoyed learning about the Doncaster Plant Works and its use throughout and after Industrial Revolution. After exploring the five stages of its development, the children created their own informational flap books as well as drawing their own unique covers for each of the phases. This was a piece of work where many members of the class enthusiastically took it upon themselves to write about the Plant and present their work as beautifully as they could. Awesome work, class!

Sharing our Stories: 22/01/2024

22nd January 2024Geoff Hewitt

Beautiful Work This Week

XP Festival of Learning

On Friday, staff across our Trust gathered to launch the first phase of our exciting new Teaching and Learning model, with a focus on our culture of Crew, underpinning principles, deliberate & intentional teaching/learning behaviours at its heart…

Staff from our secondaries and primaries grappled with this exciting new model and took part in a wide range of workshops to develop teaching and learning at XP.

Carcroft School: How Could We Help Our Planet Survive?

In Autumn 2023, Years 5 and 6 completed an expedition looking at the impact we are having on the planet and what we could do to make a difference now and for future generations. They held their presentation of learning last week!

Their final product for this expedition was a picture frame made from sustainably-sourced materials. Students then chose their favourite piece of writing from across the expedition to publish in the frame alongside (or behind) a simple piece of artwork reflecting elements of our learning. Beautiful work!

Top of the Blogs

Delicious Recycling @ Norton Infants

Crew Oldridge’s Experiments @ Green Top

Weekly update for families @ XP Gateshead

XP Outdoors – Mindfulness Walk @ XP

Future Architects? @ Plover

Life Skills in LOOL @ XP East

Crew Challenge @ Carcroft School

Problem Solving – Square Numbers @ Norton Juniors

Share your stories with us!

We now have a new dedicated news email so that you can send your stories, updates or ideas about potential news articles directly to us in Comms.

It might be something you or your students have achieved, a charity you’re supporting or anything at all that deserves a wider audience.

Write to us at [email protected] – we want to hear about it, write about it and celebrate it!

Problem Solving- Square Numbers

18th January 2024Joshua Carr

We finished this week in Mathematics with some problem-solving activities. The students were showing resilience and perseverance by using a trial and error method to try and order the numbers so the adjacent numbers were added together to make a square number.

First peak at our first week!

16th January 2024Gavin Chadwick

What an amazing first week we had back at school! Here, the children undertook a variety of tasks and activities that built towards revealing our Expedition Title and Guiding Question: There is no Planet B and Why Should we Protect our Wonderful World. The week began with a gallery walk critiquing the work of Hull based artist Mandy Barker and was followed by some graphite drawings of woodland animals. We then revealed our Core Text: The Last Bear and imitated the cover picture in our own style. Our children were also physically as well as mentally active and took part in a local litter pick where we counted, categorised and recycled our rubbish. The innumerate number of tin cans collected from this litter pick were used to create some amazing artwork that will form part of our final product. Both Y3 and 4 engaged in a breathtaking and immersive VR experience and if that wasn’t enough, our pupils managed to write their scripts for their Student Led Conferences this week. Indeed, what a week!

Year 6 Fieldwork

15th January 2024Stephanie Oliver

Last week, Year 6 embarked on fieldwork to Doncaster City Centre and Danum Museum to discover how the Industrial Revolution has influenced Doncaster today. We found out that Doncaster Plant Works were pivotal in the development of trains and took a tour around Doncaster looking at Victorian buildings and their purpose then and now. We concluded our trip with a visit to Danum Museum where we found out more about Doncaster’s rail heritage.

Sharing our Stories: 12/01/2024

12th January 2024Geoff Hewitt

Beautiful Work This Week

Another brick in the wall: Beautiful Work from XP Gateshead

In Autumn 2023, students in Year 9 studied a joint HUMAN and STEAM expedition called ‘Another Brick in the Wall’ where students had to answer the guiding question: ‘How are structures important in helping us to explain our world?’

For the final product, students used plaster to create sculptures in the brutalist aesthetic. The Presentation of Learning (PoL) was an unveiling of an installation to the community and dedicated to the people of Gateshead, who have suffered due to the Covid pandemic and the cost of living crisis; both examples of failings of societal structures. Experts, including architects from SOS-UK and Ryder Architecture, whom the students had worked alongside throughout the learning expedition, came along to speak at the PoL at the Farrell Centre, Newcastle University.

The work will be on display there for the foreseeable future!

We Are Artists at Plover

Mel from the XP Trust Comms Crew visited Plover as an Expert Artist – showing Year 5 how to draw trains and teach them about perspective and the vanishing point. The children enjoyed seeing her amazing drawings and made a great start on having a go at their own drawings.

Carcroft’s Fabulous Foyer!

Whilst making an impromptu visit to Carcroft Primary in December, we noticed this! We simply had to get the phone out and take some photos of the wonderful displays on show in the Carcroft foyer area. The array of work exhibited was interesting, engaging and of high quality; and was curated impeccably by the staff – beautiful work!